2. Contact Info

3. Dealer Selection

We can hear the comments already: “For 200 grand, I’d buy two GT-Rs!” Well, you could, but you still wouldn’t have a single 2012 Bentley Continental GTC. What most people don’t understand about Bentley customers is that price isn’t an issue — at all. The Bentley buyers aren’t deciding which $200,000 car to buy — they’re deciding which mansion gets the new car. Some match their car’s color to the color scheme of the yacht that carries it to exotic ports around the world. In short, Bentley owners don’t care that you think they should have bought a GT-R or an Aston Martin or even a fully stocked ice cream truck, because, odds are, they already own one of those and any other car you think is better and cheaper.

This is why Bentley doesn’t really consider any other manufacturer a competitor. For the coachbuilders from Crewe, it isn’t about going head-to-head with another manufacturer; it’s about building something so incredible, it gets the attention of a person with unlimited funds and not enough time to spend them.

While we tested the Bentley like any other car, it is difficult to compare the Continental GTC W12 to anything in our test logs. How many 5500-pound sports touring convertibles are there? The new Bentley drop-top is more powerful than the previous car. The 6.0-liter twin-turbo W-12 now produces 567 horsepower with a staggering 516 lb-ft of torque. While that may not sound like a huge number from 6.0 liters, it is more about power density than peak numbers. Other cars might produce bigger numbers with less displacement and even natural aspiration, but they don’t produce peak torque from 1700 to 6000 rpm.

On the dragstrip, the giant mass of torque combined with the all-wheel-drive system means Big Ben can leap off the line like a pharmaceutically enhanced sprinter. Launching is simple and straightforward. Slide the gear selector into Sport mode, then put your left Ferragamo on the brake pedal and the right Ferragamo on the throttle flat to the floor. Hold onto your Brent Black fedora when you release the brake, because it throws you back like a turbocharged catapult. If you’re curious how the launch stacks up with similarly powered vehicles, the 1700-pound lighter but rear-drive Mercedes SLS AMG is barely two-hundredths of a second faster from 0-30 mph, while the one-ton lighter and also all-wheel-drive Audi R8 GT is just two-tenths of a second faster to 30 mph. Of course both sports cars walk away from the car after that.

The Bentley gets from 0-60 mph in just 4.8 seconds. It rockets through the quarter-mile in 13.4 seconds at 104.7 mph. The acceleration is relentless, and it will keep pulling well past the end of the quarter-mile. The shifts are smooth but deliberate. They aren’t neck-snapping like the current crop of automated manual supercars, but even with traditional automatic, shifts are quick and crisp.

While impressed, we weren’t particularly surprised by the acceleration. We test lots of fast cars and the GTC is just a plus-sized model. What did get our attention was the face-stretching stopping abilities. Our test car arrived on the optional tire and wheel package that includes 275/35ZR21 Pirelli PZero tires at all four corners. While that is a hugely wide contact patch for a front tire, those poor rubber pelts are dealing with giant stopping forces from the 15.9-inch front brakes. Jumping on the wide pedal is like throwing out an anchor, the Bentley grinds to a halt in 108 feet. Even while the forces are pulling the Botox from your face, the car is still glued to the ground, the tail end doesn’t move, and everything stays in the same direction it started in.

Although these cars aren’t likely to ever see a racetrack, we can’t call it a thorough test without some time torturing tires on our figure eight. To start, you can’t defeat the traction and stability control on the GTC, but again, this will never be an issue for 99.9 percent of all Bentley owners. When we first drove the new Bentley on the road, we remarked how tossable the car was and how it rotated off throttle. This was while driving the car well below its ultimate limits, for obvious reasons. At the track, we crept past the car’s limits to find out what it does on the ragged edge. As speed and lateral g’s build, the car becomes less and less neutral transitioning into understeer. Going in way too hot results in grinding the front tires across the asphalt that sends a shudder through the front end and scrubs off speed with every tread block screeching. The trick is to get your braking done early and enter just a little slower than you think you should.

If you time it right when you get the car turned in and pick up the throttle, you can hit maximum g just before the apex. Lift out of the throttle fast and the back end will swing around as the nose tucks in. Then just get back on the gas let the engine do the work. This is where it falters just slightly. Even though the car has copious amounts of grip, more torque than a locomotive, and a high-tech rear biased all-wheel-drive system, the computer strangles the throttle and won’t allow the car really let loose. We have no doubt that a big tire-smoking four-wheel drift would be entirely possible, as well as ridiculously fun, but the computer keeps everything too classy for that. This is certainly the safe and sane attitude to cornering at the limit, but should sanity enter a conversation involving a 567-horsepower double-V engine?

I drove the Continental GTC for a week straight, through my neighborhood full of condos with a post-housing-bust price tag roughly equal to that of the Bentley. Though the Bentley is one of the best cars you can buy at the price, I simply can’t comprehend that level of wealth. If I do ever achieve the status that allows me to wear a handmade wristwatch equal to the price of the car I currently own, a Bentley will, without a doubt, fill one of the spaces in my airship-hangar-turned-garage.

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2012 Bentley Continental News and Reviews

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